“I’ll squander the hours I should be working trolling the internet for pictures of women whose leg warmers have been spattered with semen. You could call this my kink.” – Lewis “Teabag” Miner, Home Land

Legwarmers piss me off in a way that other types of “let’s forget it never happened” fashion fads don’t. Because unlike “mandals,” jean-skirts, or zip-off cargo pants—which are all disgusting but fulfill a purpose—legwarmers don’t do shit to keep you warm. Sheathing your legs in tubes of yarn while your feet dangle out in the cold is like popping mittens on your elbows. So why are these frumpy, outdated, and fundamentally absurd excuses for socks the source of so many boners on the internet?

Legwarmer smut ranges from short YouTube clips of girls slipping them on and slowly rubbing their legs together to full-blown porn videos of girls—or g-string-wearing guys—fucking with their (surely very toasty) legs thrown high in the air. You can also find scores of pictures on foot fetish sites of pouty models with their legwarmers spread open. The commenters are always far more interested in the length and furriness of the legwarmers than the gaping pussies staring them in the face.

The first and most obvious explanation for a legwarmer obsession is podophilia—aka foot fetishism, one of the oldest kinks in the book. An insane number of famous people purportedly have a “thing” for feet: Andy Warhol kept a mummified foot by his bed. Goethe’s girlfriend nicknamed his dick “Mr. Nicefoot.” And considering the cover of Ludacris’s sophmore album, he loves feet as much as he loves chicken and beer.

Of course, enjoying a quick toe nibble from time to time isn’t really a fetish—it’s built into our neurology. Scientists believe our fondness for a good toe sucking has everything to do with the fact that the areas detecting sensory input for your feet and genitals are right next to each other in your brain. In fact, the acclaimed neuroscientist and phantom limb specialist V. S. Ramachandran wrote about one his patients—an amputee—who actually used to come in his phantom leg when he had sex. The lucky dude explained that his orgasms were “much bigger than it used to be because it’s no longer just confined to my genitals.”

But under the large umbrella of foot fetishism, legwarmer porn skews more towards the weirder side of the spectrum—the side where you’d also find, like, guys buying sweat-drenched socks off eBay, and rednecks watching girls in stilettoes rev up stubborn trucks. (It’s called “pedal pumping,” and it’s amazing.)

The weirdness of legwarmer porn, however, isn’t as overtly creepy as sweaty socks and pedal pumping. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite—dudes who are into legwarmers seem obsessed on an Etsy-scale with cuteness and softness. “I prefer when they just bunch up at the ankles, leaving the cute feet exposed ;)” confessed a leg warmer lover I found on Reddit’s r/Feet. Another confessed that “if legwarmers look soft and the feeties are peeking from under it, I just can’t hold myself.” Yet another told me that, “Depending on the color, they can make feet look sexier, like a bright orange, for instance.” You can almost hear them squealing over thread counts.

In my last attempt to really get into the heads of leg warmer filth fans, I turned to the novelist Sam Lipsyte, whose book on post-collegiate loserdom, Home Land, is centered on a guy who spends his days trolling the internet for pictures of women wearing semen-splattered leg warmers. Why did he choose these stupid socks as his protagonist’s erotic fixation? “Flashdance meant a lot to me,” quipped Lipsyte, “Though I’m more directed to the knee.” Well, at least he doesn’t jack off to sock puppets.